Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Andre Gide (French Novelist)

André Gide (1869–1951,) fully André Paul Guillaume Gide, was a French novelist, writer, and diarist. This winner of the 1947 Nobel Prize in Literature is generally regarded as one of France’s most celebrated novelists.

Born to a middle-class Protestant family in Paris, Gide published his first novel, The Notebooks of André Walter (1891,) at age 22. In 1893 and 1894, Gide journeyed to Northern Africa, where he became very ill and narrowly escaped death. This decisive event led him to question his puritanical upbringing. It formed the basis for a pair of his renowned psychological novels, The Immoralist (1902,) about pleasure-seeking and yearning for new experiences, and Strait is the Gate (1909,) about the complexities of adolescence, love, asceticism, and sacrifice.

Gide published several semi-autobiographical narratives, essays, and memoirs. His works are characterized by the tensions in his life, viz., conflict and compromise between a sense of social moralities and individuality and the need for acceptance despite his controversial personal life and beliefs. In another famous novel, The Counterfeiters (1926,) Gide exposed the hypocrisy of insincere people. He also served as a literary critic and translated William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Joseph Conrad, and Rainer Maria Rilke.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Andre Gide

Fish die belly-upward and rise to the surface; it is their way of falling.
—Andre Gide

The only real education comes from what goes counter to you.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Education

One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Courage, Doubt, Action, Uncertainty, Risk, Discovery, Exploration

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Art, Artists, Arts

It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves—in finding themselves.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Adventure

The young people who come to me in the hope of hearing me utter a few memorable maxims are quite disappointed. Aphorisms are not my forte, I say nothing but banalities…. I listen to them and they go away delighted.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Listening

Man: The most complex of beings, and thus the most dependent of beings. On all that made you up, you depend.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Man, Mankind

Sadness is a state of sin.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Happiness, Unhappiness

In order to be utterly happy, the only thing necessary is to refrain from comparing this moment with other moments in the past, which I often did not fully enjoy because I was comparing them with other moments of the future.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Time Management, The Present, Happiness, Value of Time

Humanity cherishes its swaddling clothes; but it shall not grow up unless it can free itself from them. Turning down his mother’s breast does not make the weaned child ungrateful. … Rise up naked, valiant; make the sheaths crack; push aside the stakes; to grow straight you need no more than the thrust of your sap and the call of the sun.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Humanity

To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him, and travel in his company.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Reading

What would there be in a story of happiness? Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Writing

It is good to follow one’s own bent, so long as it leads upward.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Purpose

All these books have lived together … inside my mind. They follow one another only on paper and because of an utter impossibility to let themselves be all written at the same time. Whatever book I write, I never devote myself to it completely, and the matter which most insistently requires me soon later develops, however, at the other end of me.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Authors & Writing

True kindness presupposes the faculty of imagining as one’s own the suffering and joys of others.
—Andre Gide

One completely overcomes only what one assimilates.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Acceptance

Seize from every moment its unique novelty, and do not prepare your joys.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Live-now, The Present, Past and Present

In order to judge properly, one must get away somewhat from what one is judging, after having loved it. This is true of countries, of persons, and of oneself.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Self-Discovery

We live counterfeit lives in order to resemble the idea we first had of ourselves.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Being Ourselves

Whoever starts out toward the unknown must consent to venture alone.
—Andre Gide

Nothing is so silly as the expression of a man who is being complimented.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Praise, Compliments

The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Hypocrisy

Old hands soil, it seems, whatever they caress, but they too have their beauty when they are joined in prayer. Young hands were made for caresses and the sheathing of love. It is a pity to make them join too soon.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Prayer

Believe those who seek the truth, doubt those who find it; doubt all, but do not doubt yourself.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Truth

It is not always by plugging away at a difficulty and sticking at it that one overcomes it; but, rather, often by working on the one next to it. Certain people and certain things require to be approached at an angle.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Perseverance, Ideas

“Know thyself” – a maxim as pernicious as it is odious. A person observing himself would arrest his own development. Any caterpillar who tried to “know himself” would never become a butterfly.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Self-Discovery, Knowledge

There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Fear, Anxiety

Solitude is bearable only with God.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Solitude

It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for something you are not.
—Andre Gide

Before I explain my book to others, I expect them to explain it to me. To claim to explain it first is to immediately narrow down its reach; for if we know what we intended to say, we do not know whether we said only that. – One always says more than THAT. – And what interests me most is what I put in without knowing, – that unconscious share, which I would like to call God’s share.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Authors & Writing

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